The rise of techno-capitalism has signaled the triumph of the “bourgeois family” and the demise of the “traditional” family. Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas said that economist Adam Smith was well aware that the “weakening of familial ties would increase the necessity of sympathy between strangers and result in cooperative forms of behavior that had not previously been realized.” Commenting on Hauerwas’s statement, Professor David Crawford of the John Paul II Institute for the Studies on Marriage and family said, “It is not that families would cease to exist, but they would be transformed into the image of the exchange relations that underlie liberal societies.”1

Two aspects of the triumph of the “bourgeois family” have had a profound effect on society: first is the capricious yearning for the so-called “better life,” which has resulted in a highly trained cadre of consumers, and second, an increasing lack of significance attached to the concepts of “place,” and family. These two factors have played an important role in a society that has become acclimated to a rather pernicious spiritual condition that theologian, David Schindler, refers to as “homelessness.”

Kentucky essayist, poet, and novelist Wendell Berry has given his readers a glimpse of people who lived the “old ways.” In six novels and twenty-three short stories Berry has created the Port William membership, a group of neighbors who live along the ridges and “bottoms” south of “the river” in and around Port William, Kentucky, a town that never was yet always existed in our hearts.

It was Burley Coulter, a leading participant in the Port William membership, who told of the time when it all went “wayward,” when the idea of “place” came under attack, “And now look at how many are gone…the mold they were made in done throwed away, and the young ones dead in the wars or killed in damned automobiles, or gone off to college and made too smart ever to come back, or gone off to bright lights and ain’t going to work in the sun ever again if they can help it.” 2

But the Port William membership lives on in the old ones. Surely, they are fewer and fewer in number, but they remember, and they are great storytellers. And, it is the doyenne of the Port William membership, Hannah Coulter, who has told her story.

Hannah Coulter is a novel that is filled with the truth of an inherent wisdom imprinted on the soul. Berry has captured the intrinsic nature of man and it is defined by God, family, community, and “place.” And, it is the “place,” the land, which acts to nurture and keep the whole of it.

One element of this novel is Berry’s rejection of the spurious notion that there exits an “equality of the sexes.” Hannah Coulter would no more renounce her interdependence on her husband, Nathan, than she would expect some bureaucracy, and its monthly stipend, to fulfill her responsibilities to her children. Life and living was never just a simple notion of economic determinism. Her life revolved around God, family, community and place, nourished by truth, goodness, and justice.

The uncontrived goodness of the membership is best described in how they cared for the elderly. They were not abandoned in their dotage. They were not sent off to a “home.” They were treated with respect and given dignity.

When the Feltner’s became too old to do their work the membership helped them on their farm. The hay and tobacco was always cut, the fences mended, the stock watered and fed. Hannah and Mary Penn and any of a half dozen ladies would help Mrs. Feltner in cooking and cleaning and canning and in whatever chore needed doing. In the end the Feltner’s died in their home, surrounded by their children and their friends. Then, of course, the community participated in a real and ritualized grief, engaging in the act of remembrance, for the Feltner’s were truly loved.

But, Hannah tells her story from an awareness of self and an understanding of community. She always knew who she was, never complaining about a lack of advantages, never engaging in self-pity. She saw the membership, her family, herself, as gifts. Her excellent mind, her good health, the love that surrounded her were gifts and she accepted, and nourished, and cherished those gifts. There was never any need to blindly consume. Her joy and happiness were at the core of her being. And, this attitude, this way of life, was part of the membership.

But then, it is Hannah who can best tell us of her community, “This membership had an economic purpose and it had and economic result, but the purpose and the result were a lot more than economic…the work was freely given in exchange for work freely given. There was no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up. What you owed was considered paid when you had done what was needed doing. Every account was paid in full by the understanding that when we were needed we would go, and when we had need the other, or enough of them, would come.”

Hannah could have made different choices. She could have been bitter when her first husband, Virgil-Mat and Margaret’s son-didn’t come home from the war. But Virgil had left her with a daughter, Margaret-named after her grandmother- and Hannah continued living on the Feltner farm just north of Port William. Perhaps, Hannah’s choices had much to do with little Margaret, perhaps they were the result of her moral acuity but surely they pleased the Almighty.

When Nathan Coulter came back from the war he took to farming with his family who were part of the membership and that put him in close proximity to Hannah and her in-laws at the Feltner place. Hannah tells us that, “It was a strange courtship we had. My love for Virgil had begun in a kind of innocence, leading only in time to knowledge. But what was coming into being between Nathan and me was not a youthful romance. It was a knowing love. Both of us had suffered the war. He had fought in it, and I had waited it out in fear and sorrow at home. We both were losers by it, he of a brother, I of a husband. Now we were coming together out of fear and loss and grief, and we knew it.”

But, Hannah is an honest woman, “My life with Nathan turned out to be a long life, and actual marriage with trouble in it. I am not complaining. Troubles came, as they were bound to do, as the promise we made had warned us they would. I can remember the troubles and speak of them, but not to complain. I am beginning again to speak of my gratitude.”

As David Schindler has written, “Man is at home, therefore, when he is rightly related to God, to others, and to the world in and through the family. It is within these relations and in their right ordering that he finds his basic place of residence, or truly comes to rest.”3 The Port William membership, even in their most trying hour, always knew a spiritual peace, they always knew “home.”

Hannah tells us of salvation and forgiveness. She may speak freely of these things for she is older now, the last of her generation. She walks with a cane and still treks through the woods remembering, always remembering, “Like a lot of old people I have known, I am now living in two places: the place as it was and the place as it is. As it was it is almost always present to me, with the dead moving about in it as they were: Virgil, Old Jack Beechum, Mat and Margaret Feltner, Joe and Nettie Banion, Burley and Jarrat Coulter, Art and Mart Rowanberry, Elton and Mary Penn, Bess and Wheeler Catlett, Nathan. By the ones who have moved away, as many have done, as my children have done, the dead may be easily forgotten. But to those who remain, the place is always forever a reminder. And so, the absent come into presence.”

Hannah’s life has reached the time of ghosts. Her loved ones, now gone, come to her as they always do. It is a time of great peace for this kind, generous, and loving lady and Hannah understands just how much Port William and its environs meant to her long and blessed life, “There is no “better place” than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.”

There was a time, not many decades ago, when most of America’s population labored on family farms. Back then the primary objective of the American farmer was to be debt free and independent. I was made aware of this “independence” many years ago when my mother-in-law, the daughter of a West Virginia farmer, once commented about her childhood, “We didn’t know there was a depression.”

There was a price for this independence but there were also rewards that transcended wealth or profit and had more to do with the satisfaction of leaving the place better than you found it. It is worth repeating: the idea of “place” is an important factor in thinking about civilization. Techo-capitalism has removed “place” from the sum of the parts that make up “modern” man; it has had a deleterious effect on society, weakening both the family and the community.

In restoring to us an understanding of “place” as an important element of well-being, Wendell Berry has also perhaps shown us he is America’s finest novelist. And Hannah Coulter is likely to take its place as a classic.

Books mentioned in this essay can be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.

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Robert Cheeks is an independent writer from Lisbon, Ohio, who has written for Human Events, The Washington Times, The University Bookman, The Acton Institute’s journal-Religion and Liberty, the Southern Partisan, and many other publications.

Deep and important truths here. But unless someone goes all in, like Wendell Berry, it is difficult to implement any of this in today’s world. (Just look at us now…reading an article on a website, and in my case, now commenting). So what to do? I would suggest a small step. Seeing as we live in a world where for the most part no one actually knows even one person from whom they purchase any of their essential goods and services, perhaps an action item is: change that. Make a conscious effort to either know one person from whom you purchase essential goods and services regularly, or, start purchasing regularly and exclusively an essential good/service from someone you know and are in regular community with. In the last 6 or 8 months, our family has done that. It is a small victory, but an important one in today’s world.

Mark, I’m not sure we have a problem. All men are made up of the same stuff and live the same, general, existence which is experienced in the tension comprised of the poles, immanence and transcendence. Which is saying that if we live an “..open responsiveness to the revelation of the I AM in Exodus and of the Incarnate Word in the Johannine Gospel” we will experience the metaleptic communion, God’s Order, and our ‘place’ in this creation.

A couple of other things to consider. Place is certainly important, but in the Christian (and Jewish) faith sometimes leaving a place is part of faithfulness. Abraham – the father of faith – was commanded by God to leave his country. In the modern industrial and post-industrial world place is certainly undervalued – but it is not an absolute.

The other is that for the Christian – there is a certain amount of homelessness that is built in to our faith. Our citizenship is in heaven – (the old spiritual goes – “this world is not my home, I am just a-passing through) and even familial bonds are secondary to faithfulness to God. Berry’s writing certainly expresses much of what is lacking in modern and postmodern life. But the picture is incomplete.

Steve, great point re: ‘place’ and Voegelin speaks to it in an essay regarding Exodus but darn if I can find it for your reference. Perhaps, we have a good Voegelin scholar that might provide a reference. I agree with you re: Christian homelessness, and also that persecution makes really good Christians. However, Mr. Calvin (I believe?) mentioned that it was a good thing to work hard, make a lot of money, and give it first to your family, then the church, then fellow Christians in need, and last, to those non-Christians who are suffering. The irony of the Port William Membership is that they did for themselves and their neighbors without swearing allegiance to Moscow. As far as I remember there were no Gummint Offices about the county to distribute welfare from Washington City. I’ve often wondered why Mr. Berry, who appears to have favored the policies of the New Deal never wrote up a “good” apparatchik who mucked about handing out tax dollars to the indigent, while feeling their pain?

“I’ve often wondered why Mr. Berry, who appears to have favored the policies of the New Deal never wrote up a “good” apparatchik who mucked about handing out tax dollars to the indigent, while feeling their pain?”

I’ve wondered that, too. Given how much the New Deal (I’m thinking particularly of the agricultural policies – though it applies to many other aspects) was a massive contributor to the very types of trends in living that Berry decries – perhaps he just didn’t want to explore that. None of us tends to deal well with our internal contradictions and Berry is no exception.

Steve, you’re probably right. Who can get particularly sentimental or nostalgic as a result of the actions of a state bureaucrat? Just by writing the word “bureaucrat” the reader knows I’ve crossed over into a non-reality situation. Re: the “New Deal”, one gets the impression that Eleanor wanted to make American kulaks-sp?

While I understand the arguement about Christian homelessness and the view that athegood life is theoretically possible everywhere, I tend to agree with the article that place is of fundamental if not primary importance. This is because being in a concrete place surrounded by concrete people for a prolongued time is the context for nourishing a practical humanity, rather than a merely abstract one as would arise if we were truly constantly mobile. Besides, our democratic political system cannot survive if all power rests in rootless proletariand who have npat best shallow connections to their communities. Self governing citizens have their family and city.

On a personal note, my greatest achievement in life is living within a 20 minute distance of my roughly 30 or so person family, seeing oneanother often, helping one another, going to the same local gym, grocer, having the same business partners for many years now, and generally living in the city of my birth, which is well known to me and culturaly homogenous, and thus predictable. Come to think of it, I even vacation in the same place, namely Brussels, which I have grown fond of as if it were a second home.

The world is big and travel cheap and easy, but my travels have. Shown me a world of ever mobile proletarians with little to distinguish them culturally, slowly pushing aside any distinct human cultures. Europe, for instance, used to be a wonderful repository of diversity, but now it is by and large the same…

Mr. Rieth, I enjoyed your erudite remarks on ‘place,,’ and would only add that perhaps its the permanence, the durability of ‘place’ that grounds the human psyche to it? Perhaps its the possibility inherent in man that as a family, group, tribe, civilization if we can survive at this place we can participate in the salvific freedom proffered by a generous God. Perhaps, the yearning for ‘place’, so eloquently described by Berry, is part of the concinnity of elements that make up the human construct?

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The conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest. - Russell Kirk